Soul Beach

toes.
    Warm?
    I look down at my toes. They’re resting on my IKEA rug.
    The screen has frozen now. All I can see is pale brown. Has the site crashed?
    I move my mouse and the blue comes back.
    Ah. I’d fallen face-first onto the sand.
    As I scramble to my feet, a cloud of dust appears at the edge of my vision. I clamp my lips shut so it doesn’t go in my mouth.
    Yeah, right. Because virtual sand is really something to worry about, compared to insanity.
    I keep walking, keep looking for an exit. The perfection of this place suddenly feels claustrophobic. This isn’t heaven. Maybe it’s hell. Or maybe it’s a virus that’s infected my computer: the Wish You Were Here virus. Dad’s going to go mad if this thing is eating my hard drive. They only bought me the laptop on my birthday.
    My birthday. Meggie’s death -day.
    ‘I don’t need this, I really don’t need this,’ I say, and I realise I’m crying. ‘Not on top of everything else.’
    The sound of the waves changes.
    No.
    It can’t be.
    I move closer to the tinny speaker in my laptop and then I hear it for sure. Somewhere below the waves, there is a voice. It’s small. It’s frightened. It’s hardly recognisable. But it’s there.
    ‘ Florrie? Is it you, at last? Oh, please. I need it to be you . . .’

11
    ‘Meggie?’ I whisper her name, unable to believe it’s really her.
    Nothing comes back. Perhaps I wasn’t loud enough. I nudge closer to the mike on my laptop. ‘Meggie?’
    ‘Florrie . . .’ A murmur, nothing more. She sounds different. Flatter, less lively, not at all like my sister. The possibility that she’s a hoaxer, that this whole thing is a sick set-up, pinballs round my head again, but I dismiss it; no one would go to this much trouble. It’s too crazy.
    More crazy than communicating with the dead through a social networking site?
    ‘Are you really there, Meggie?’
    ‘Of course I am. But I didn’t think you were ever going to show up.’
    That’s more like her. ‘Where are you, Meggie?’
    I hear a very Meggie-like sigh now. ‘Oh, bloody hell. So they were right.’
    ‘They?’
    ‘The others. They said that maybe you wouldn’t be able to see us at first.’
    ‘All I can see is an empty beach.’ So empty that it feels like the very end of the world.
    ‘Weird. There are loads of us around this morning. The philosophers are having a picnic to your left. The Emos are on the edge of the pier, wondering whether to jump, and feeling extra pissed off that if they do they’ll float right back to the surface again like suicidal life buoys.’
    Emos? Picnics? So many questions form in my head. I start with the most important. ‘Where are you ?’
    ‘I’m right beside you. I’m touching your right hand.’
    I look down at my hand, gripping the mouse. ‘I can’t feel anything.’
    ‘Well, doh. You are on a website , aren’t you?’ and she sounds so big sister-ish that I smile.
    ‘Where are you now, Meggie?’
    ‘I haven’t moved.’
    ‘No, I mean, where are you? Where is . . . this?’
    A huge sigh comes out of my speakers now. On the screen, a massive wave breaks on the shore and I think I catch a glimpse of a person in front of it, but then the shape melts away like sea spray.
    ‘You were exactly like this when you were four. Why does the man in the moon never blink? How can cheese be yellow when milk is white? Why don’t humans have wings? The truth is, I don’t have a bloody clue where this is. The philosophers debate it endlessly, but that’s not my idea of a good night out.’
    ‘Might you be in heaven?’
    I know it’s madness but I swear I feel her breath on my neck as she laughs. ‘Maybe. It’s certainly a version of paradise. We always joke about it being modelled on some icky honeymoon resort. Danny’s been all over the Caribbean and reckons it’s like that, but then Triti’s Indian and she says it’s like Goa.’
    Danny? Triti? I hadn’t imagined my sister having fun in the afterlife. All this time I’ve been so alone, and now I find out she’s got herself a gang of mates again. ‘Who are the philosophers?’ I rack my brains. ‘Marx and Einstein?’
    ‘Oh, no,’ she scoffs. ‘There’s no one old h ere. It’s our nickname for the really intense bunch who refuse to talk to the rest of us because they haven’t accepted that they’re here yet. Suicides, we reckon.’
    ‘Suicides? Is everyone there dead?’
    ‘Well, doh.’
    It’s then I realise I haven’t asked her the most